1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and systems for reducing runway incursions at airports, including such methods and systems which utilize the local airfield communications channel and the flat panel display system on board the aircraft to provide visibility of active aircraft within an airport to other aircraft within the airport on the display system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Runway safety is a vital component of aviation safety as a whole and of vital concern to both the Federal Aviation Administration, pilots, and the flying public. Although considerable work has been done on the development of sophisticated collision avoidance systems to prevent mid-air collisions, such has not been the case with respect to systems to avoid collisions once the aircraft is safely on the ground, or to reduce or prevent runway incursions at crowded airports. Instead, considerable reliance has been placed on visual sightings by the control tower or a pilot of a taxiing aircraft to provide a verbal warning of a potential runway incursion so that evasive action can then be taken. Although this has proven satisfactory under certain conditions, it has not always worked and has resulted in catastrophic situations, such as the air disaster which occurred in Majorcca when two large commercial jets collided on the ground resulting in several deaths, as well as resulting in many near misses. This situation becomes even more critical at airports with multiple runways and taxiways where several aircraft are in motion on the ground simultaneously. In addition, the predicted growth over the next several years in air traffic will only add to the problem and implies that the number of such actual incidents may rise if improvements are not made in methods and systems for preventing or reducing runway incursions
Existing flat panel display systems, such as the systems described in the aforementioned commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 6,693,558, and two copending patent applications, all of which have been incorporated by reference in their entirety herein, include global positioning systems or GPS; however, to the applicant's knowledge, such GPS systems have not been utilized to avoid or prevent runway incursions. Moreover, commercial graphics processors, or CGPs, from the gaming industry have been used in the past by avionics suppliers for other applications with little to no mandated safety guidelines. In fact, it is known that there are potential failures which can occur within such commercial graphic processors which can result in a display of misleading information to a pilot, which is the last thing one would want in a system which would be intended to avoid or prevent runway incursions where misleading information could result in a potential disaster. Although complex and costly systems might be developed which could solve the problem, because of the need to then retrofit existing aircraft with such a system, there exists a need for a simple and low cost method and system capable of providing a geo-referenced display of all active aircraft within an airport to all aircraft within that airport, such as on an electronic airport map viewable to both the pilots on the ground as well as to the ground controller in the tower.